Need help with transparency!

Hi guys/gals. I need a question answered.

I'm trying to make a wing, a specific one, to go with a specific av.

So I found the pic of the wing I wanted.
I went into photoshop cs and cropped the wing out and copied what was cropped.

I created a new image, with a transparent background.
Saved it as a 32 bit tga.
Imported into secondlife ($10L is not a problem, i can do it many times) but getting that white fill in the background when I try to apply it to a box shape etc and well, its annoying me that its not working.

I know I'm missing something else, what is it??

Targas actually use alpha channels, they don't understand Photoshop's "no background" transparency. You need to select everything that should be filled in (opaque), create an alpha channel and fill that selection in with white or shades of grey for partial transparency. Black marks everything that is transparent.

hmmm...I use photoshop 7.0 with no upgrade and can save files as .tga for transperancy purposes...but if I am not mistaken this is broken in cs so you may actually have to create an alpha channel. Nicola Escher has a terrific tutorial on spacethinkdream.com which details the steps for creating alpha channels so I won't elaborate too much other than to say that it does help to create a background which is a similar color to the texture you are using so as to keep the crazy white line from showing up once you upload it.

If you wish to try a .tga upload without an alpha channel to see if it works on cs...you have to make sure that the grid is visible...no background color at all around the texture...in otherwords select the white area or area that you wish to be transperant and delete it so that you can see the grid. Then save it as a .tga and try to upload it that way. Hope this helps

Here's a link to some tutorials including Nicola's spacethinkdream.com. They are a great resource.

It's actually not "broken", just so you know. Adobe had made what I considered to be an improvement when they released version 7, making targas behave like PSD's and other file formats with respect to transparency, but unfortunately some people who were used to the old alpha method complained and Adobe eventually removed this feature from version 7 with a patch, and did not include it in CS. It's too bad really. It's so much easier and more logical to just assume what you see is what you get, but unfortunately we are at the mercy of a few loud mouth die hards who seem to love their outdated methods. Giant step backwards in digital arts

I wasn't really sure of the past history or why the transparency functions were changed...I had always assumed that it was a bug exploit. I am far from an expert but had heard that other versions required an alpha channel whereas the original 7.0 did not...

Thanks for the heads up though

The only positive that I can see regarding creating an alpha channel is the ability to make certain that there are no oddly colored or strange lines around your texture when you upload it and that the shape is precise...though it does make it harder to create multiple layers with varying levels of transparancy...s'pose there are pros and cons to both methods...

Just a question...not to hijjack the thread...Is it possible to use an alpha channel for an image with multiple transparancies once it is merged so that you can have levels of transparancy within the texture and complete transparancy around the texture?

That was actually how I first went about it. I used the point to point crop tool to precisely pick out the shape of the wing I wanted, copied what was in the selection, and made a NEW image with a transparent background. So in otherworse when I pasted the wing in, I could see the background everywhere around the wing.

I noticed that I had an older version of PS 7.0 and it wasn't saving out alphas on targas so I had to grab a patch that would fix the Targa save options to work.

The most significant fixes in the 7.0.1 release include the following:


• Photoshop now saves alpha transparency data in Targa files in the same way it did in previous versions.

So make sure you have that patch, I think there is just a single fix for just targa and not the whole patch if thats all you need aswell.

Personally, I recommend against that patch unless you want to do the extra work required to manually paint alphas. 7.0 is much more intuitive. Like I said earlier, what you see is what you get with 7.0. If you want something transparent, simply erase it. In all other versions of PS, you need to actually paint the alpha in order to set transparency, which in my opinion is a waiste of time, and as I said is a giant step backwards in digital arts. It is an obsolete method that old schoolers just won't let go of.

I run PS on 2 diff mahines...

1 is 7.0 with the iamage transparency model
2 is with a plugin for TGA that uses the "old school" alpha channel

both have their advantages

I find it very easy to grab a seelction and go to alpha channel and fill with the level of grayness i want.

The new way is far quicker and if you manipulate the transparency sliders on each layer or use an opacity mask etc then ..show only the layers u want to include and hit the save as Tga button..

wonderful and i have uploaded both styles to SL and they both work.

I use the alpha mask for times when I do not want the white edge that can creep in otherwise..I can "bleed" the texture outside the alpha visible areas...in the new method I think (?) transparent is seen as white and thats why we fhave many alpha'd images in SL with that horrible white rim..

Well, no, it was definitely a bug. A 32 bit TGA file is an RGBA file -- which means it has 4 channels with 8 bits of data each - red, green, blue, and alpha. I assume when you use the exploit that the transparent parts of the red, green, and blue channels were by default filled in with a value of 255 -- white. Which means if you had any anti-aliasing between your RGB and your transparent background -- it matted your image to white -- which will give you a nice white halo.

When I save a TGA file it is very rare that I want my matting to be white -- generally I choose a color close to the primary color of my image so that I get a nice smooth transition from color to transparency.

So even if I could use the bug -- I wouldn't do it -- it just doesn't make sense.



Nicola


--

Edit: Something I forgot to mention -- I have a bunch of photoshop actions that automatically create a nice alpha channel for me; this is one of things I'd like to give the community. I'll work on getting that up at spacethinkdream.com when I return from vacation!

Hi I have read this thread with interest cos I really want to learn how to get textures with levels of transparency.

I use PhotoImpact which doesn't support alpha channels. I have PS CS but have barely used it as I can do 95% of all my graphic needs more quickly and more intuitively using PI.

However when it comes to transparency, it seems that my old way of using gifs ain't gonna work.

I have read the tutorial on transparency but my version of PS doesn't seem to behave, or I don't know what the heck I am doing. Because three days later and massive lol hair loss from pulling it out I still cannot achieve a texture with some transparency.

Is there anyone who could please spend some time explaining to someone who has never used PS how to do this? I would really appreciate it as I am now running into frustration cos I cannot achieve what I want to achieve.

Thanks
dreamer Curie

*Looks frantically for his 7.0 CD "I KNEW CS WOULD PISS ME OFF!"*